Innovation awards spotlight emerging markets

Banks from around the world—including some from emerging markets—won prestigious global banking innovation awards from this year’s program sponsored by Efma and Accenture.

More than 200 financial institutions from 59 countries submitted 500 case studies of innovations within 10 categories: Customer Experience; Digital Distribution; Physical Distribution; Digital Marketing; Best New Product or Service; Best Innovation in Payments; Big Data & Analytics; Sustainable Business; Most Disruptive Innovation; and Global Innovator of the Year.

The winners were selected by a combination of votes from a panel of judges comprised exclusively of senior retail bankers from around the world and online votes from Efma members.

Efma is an association of 3,300 retail financial services companies in more than 130 countries. The program, jointly launched by Efma and Accenture, recognizes financial services firms for the most-innovative projects and initiatives in distribution and marketing. It’s now in its third year.

And the envelope please…

This year’s winners are:

• Denizbank, Turkey, won the Global Innovator of the Year award for its digital banking model, which includes Facebook banking; Direct Message, which accepts credit applications through Twitter; and its fastPay mobile wallet application.

• Idea Bank, Poland, won two awards—the Most Disruptive Innovation and the Digital Distribution awards—for its Idea Cloud, Europe’s first banking cloud. Idea Cloud enables the bank’s small- and medium-sized enterprise clients to administer accounts, payments, documents, and client data—as well as conduct ebanking—from a single cloud platform.

• mBank, Poland, won the Digital Marketing award for its real-time marketing platform, which enabled the bank to identify an additional 300,000 sales leads per month by analyzing card transaction, web traffic, and geolocation data about its customers and presenting relevant offers to them based on that data.

• Allied Irish Bank, Ireland, won the Customer Experience award for eMortgage, the first Irish-market digitized end-to-end mortgage offering, enabling customers to complete applications, obtain loan approval, and upload and sign documents online.

• Intesa Sanpaolo, Italy, won the Physical Distribution award for its paperless branch model, which digitally produces and stores the bank’s paper documents, minimizes customers’ paper documents, reduces storage costs, and enables digital signatures.

• KBC Securities, Belgium, won the Best New Product or Service award for Bolero Crowdfunding, a crowdfunding website enabling startups and established businesses to obtain financing from investors. Bolero is the bank’s online stock trading platform.

• Polski Standard Platnosci, Poland, a consortium of several Polish banks, won the Best Innovation in Payments award for its mobile payments standard, which generates a digital code enabling mobile payments, ATM withdrawals, and point-of-service payments by phone, and online payments.

• Nedbank, South Africa, won the Big Data & Analytics award for Market Edge, its data analytics tool that enables merchants to gain insights into their customers’ shopping behaviors using a web-based platform that provides data on customers’ card transactions, income segment, and demographics.

• ICICI Bank, India, won the Sustainable Business award for its digital village initiative in Akodara. That effort allows residents to open savings accounts without submitting physical documents; transfer funds by mobile phone; and pay for goods without cash. The bank is also digitizing school records and providing digital access to telemedicine, which gives villagers remote access to health care.

Watch replay of the award-ceremony in Amsterdam [Registration required]

Watch videos from winners about their products and services on Youtube Efma Channel